Modern businesses and industries rely heavily on the creation, storage and transportation of digital documents and other kinds of digital files as a primary means of communication, information storage, and documentation. In many cases, the digital documents and files contain proprietary and/or confidential material. These documents and files may easily be disseminated in an unauthorized manner using standard electronic mail. Companies are therefore at daily risk of disclosing sensitive internal documents, leading to substantial financial losses. Banking, legal, medical, government, and manufacturing companies have much to lose if sensitive internal documents are leaked. The safe distribution of internal documents, memos, blueprints, payroll records, patient medical information, banking and financial transactions etc, is becoming more complex to ensure. In fact, as a consequence of such leaks, the United States federal government was prompted to intervene and has mandated that companies should protect sensitive information such as financial and patient medical records. From the company and business standpoint, potential risks include financial losses, fiduciary risks, legal problems, competitive intelligence, public relations problems, loss of clients and privacy liability. There is therefore a great interest in methods that mitigate disclosure of confidential digital documents.
One of the greatest obstacles to a reliable security system and mechanism is what known as “the human factor”: methods and systems for securing digital documents and digital media content that require the user to perform tedious and/or cumbersome operations in order to secure the media are rendered, in many cases, ineffective. If the user does not perform the required operations, the digital documents and the digital media remain unprotected, regardless of the strength of the basic security mechanism which underlies the system. It is therefore vital for any practical security system to be “user friendly”, such that the very action of securing the digital documents and the digital media will be a natural part of the workflow. Many of the currently used security procedures are not embedded into the natural workflow, thereby effectively discourage the users from follow the established security procedure by making it possible to neglect to use those procedures without effecting the workflow, thereby effectively causing an overall decrease in the total security level.
Another important aspect of successful security system is its compatibility with current standards and formats and with popular mailing software. Many security systems do not comply with popular formats and software which enjoy a large customer base. Such security systems present a hazard for potential costumers, regardless of the security and the sophistication of the underlying mechanism.
Another important aspect of securing documents and other confidential material, which does not exist in some of the current systems, is an effective classification method. Since there is a cost and overhead for any level of security, the level of confidentiality may be matched by different protection measures, in a manner that would balance the hazards of unauthorized disclosure and the overall cost of the protection measures, in order to assure that the system is cost-effective and that the classification tags are being taken seriously by the users
There is thus a recognized need for, and it would be highly advantageous to have, a method and system that allows control of unauthorized dissemination of electronic mail, which overcomes the drawbacks of current methods as described above.